Image: Achim Kukulies
Anette C. Halm’s art is body-related – both in painting and in video. It is therefore not surprising that she does not stop at her own body in the material and content-related dissolution of boundaries. In her artwork “Lipödemia,” which has matured into a project, she uses her own body fat, which has been suctioned off, as modeling and painting material. What sounds strange is based on a – mostly woman-specific – disturbance in the distribution of fat. The artist sees herself here as a perfoming object or subject, in order to problematize the subject of cosmetic surgery in the field of designer medicine, but also the subject of prevention of painful maldevelopments of the body. To describe the happiness of having fat removed as a foreign body, if not an enemy of the self, she forms skulls out of it, whose substance has been prepared and made durable. Or she uses the ‘material’ as a painterly means. The idea is not new. Fat has been present as a material since the 1960s, especially through Joseph Beuys. Janine Antoni, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Dieter Roth and others stand for its use. Its flexibility and its ciphering as a source of warmth and energy made fat the extreme material of the Fluxus movement. Anette C. Halm makes the threat of fat to the body through pathological misdeposition the subject of her work. The fact that she chose Düsseldorf for the intervention is reminiscent of Beuys. But she is less concerned with an energetic-transcendental action than with a self-reflexive exploitation of her own body and a creatively renewing aestheticization and triumph over the failure of the body’s own substances in her own body. (Günter Baumann)
